Information concealment in serpentine patterns

An information bearing pattern which is less obstructive than wide-spread bar codes and a method of acquiring information from printed matters with a pattern on them are proposed. Two basic patterns are assigned “0” or “1” respectively. One geometrical pattern is created combining these two patterns. As a method which can decode an image rotated in the scanning process, a square covering the black pixels at the end of four directions of the image is first determined. The rotation is eliminated by rotating the image such that the area of the square is minimized. Then the position of the pattern is discovered from the black pixels in the four directions of the picture. This way surrounding blanks are excluded in decoding. Moreover anchor information is embedded in the four corners enabling the detection of rotations by multiples of 90 degrees. We show that the proposed method works properly even if the scanned picture is rotated through computer simulations.